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Friday, 18 March 2016

Slack: Black screen at startup after 2.0.1 update

Slack 2.0.1 launches to a black screen and the tray icon states "Slack is starting up".

This is an issue known to Slack and thought to be caused by certain graphics cards/drivers.

To workaround:

Close any open instances of Slack
Open a command prompt (Start > Run or Windows key + R and enter cmd)
Type c: and press enter
Type cd %LocalAppData%\Slack\app-2.0.1
Press Enter
Type slack.exe --disable-gpu
Press Enter and Slack should now launch
Close the command prompt window

This process must be repeated each time Slack is launched or amend your shortcut accordingly.
Slack support advise the issue should be resolved in a future build.

6 comments:

THANK YOU FOR THIS!!!Slack for Windows 1.2.7 decided it wasn't going to connect any more. "Check for Updates..." claimed I had the latest version though. I was suspicious so I uninstalled it and downloaded it fresh, which brought me to 2.0.1... but that just wouldn't render properly at all and would flash blocks of black and blocks of white and scattered crosshairs and stuff. Got it to connect, but it would stutter between rendering properly and flashing to a total black screen.Changing my shortcut to include this switch made these problems go away. :DI notice that there's a "Disable hardware acceleration" checkbox in Preferences now, which likely does the same thing as the command-line switch (but doesn't do much good if someone's rendering errors are so poor that they can't really get that far, heh). It says "If you use a Windows Classic theme, this can resolve rendering issues", but I'm using the full Windows 10 experience so I'm not sure why that particular text was chosen...Anyway. There's nothing on the Slack support page about this, which there probably should be until this issue is resolved (seems like it might be upstream)

This slack issue suddenly got me - Windows 10. Slack window was blank and white. Tried uninstalling or the flag mentioned above. Didn't help. What did help in the end was clearing the cache folder. Go to "Users\\AppData\Roaming\Slack" and delete everything that is there. "AppData" folder is hidden so you'd have to show hidden files or use command line to get there. It should help. Posting it here hoping it would help someone in the future and save them some time.